David Dalka mentioned on his blog that folks at SES Chicago 2007 were discussing video marketing’s potential for marketing boring products (today!). I was immediately reminded of the Howie Hard Drive videos. Even though data security is not the sexiest of topics, the video is a solid example of creating buzz for boring products.
I wrote short list of (what I consider) success factors for businesses creating viral videos as sales tools. Please feel free to debate these or add your own in the comments.
This set of modules and themes turns Drupal into a platform for developing Facebook Applications.
With Drupal for Facebook, you can harness all the power of Drupal in your Facebook App. If you already have content in Drupal, you can expose it on Facebook.
The Drupal for Facebook philosophy is that the functionality already built into Drupal should be used to create Facebook Applications. Where possible, we use Drupal’s user management, permission schemes, blocks, views, etc. to implement the Facebook App. Experienced Drupal users will find it very straightforward to build a Facebook App. While Facebook developers new to Drupal may want to spend some time on Drupal.org learning best practices.
Many bloggers already currently optimize their RSS feed to encourage feed discovery, post reading, or click-throughs back to site. But contextual feed readers like BlogRovr open up completely new possibilities for feed reader optimization.
What is Contextual Feed Reader Optimization?
I would define contextual feed reader optimization as optimizing your blog, RSS feed, and blog posts, so that your blog posts display to BlogRovr users when they browse contextually-relevant web pages.
Just to recap, BlogRovr is a feed reader that analyzes the webpage you are currently viewing, and then displays a list of relevant blog posts from feeds that you already subscribe to.
It just got a lot easier for you to build powerful user accounts at social sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Reddit. Check out the social media Firefox extension by 97thfloor.
With this extension, you can easily check the webpages you are viewing to see if they have already been submitted to social media sites. Find great content while browsing, and be the first to submit it.
You can even browse the social sites to find popular content that hasn’t found it’s way to other social sites!
When did feed reading become such a burden? I recently thought back to when RSS and syndication were brand new buzz words. When feed syndication was first introduced, supporters raved that RSS would save you time, right? Instead of navigating to 20 different websites to keep current on important news, RSS enabled important news to be syndicated directly to us.
And yes, subscribing to feeds increased my productivity - back when I only had 15 - 20 feed subscriptions. Now I have 87.
How many do you currently subscribe to? 50? 100? 200? Most people don’t have time to keep current with many more than that, right?
He links to examples of successful Digg submissions that used each content type (or format). The trend indicates that information presented in these formats is more effective at holding the attention of Diggers. These content formats may also enable the content to be understood more easily ‘at a glance’ - by people skimming 1000s of Digg headlines.
Here’s the condensed list of successful formats for content submitted to Digg:
Nic at Marketing Neophyte just posted the second episode of Howie Hard Drive. Howie seems to be fairly well-intentioned but unfortunately lands himself in bad situations.
This video is a great example of using buzz marketing for boring products. In fact, I’ve never empathized with a 500gb hard drive on such a deep level. Nic, please let us know how this campaign progresses.
Arun Kottolli wrote a great post about creating buzz around boring products. He also offers valuable insights into sales situations where the decision makers are not the produce end-users. His blog contains many other well-written articles also. Thanks Arun!
Also check the buzz marketing philosophy at buzzmarketing.com. Tons of good stuff there about the differences between the “push” and “pull” of marketing strategies and other buzz marketing fundamentals.
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